“Playtime with both parents is important for the development of pre-school aged children. Our research has found that playing with dad can boost a child’s vocabulary and ‘rough and tumble’ play is an excellent way for children to learn how to manage strong emotions, such as anger,” Dr Fletcher said.

“Pre-school children are developing their language and self-control at a terrific rate and early interaction with both of their parents will help develop these skills before they walk through the school gates. In the classroom children need to learn how to wait their turn, explain themselves coherently and know how to co-operate with other children. Playtime with mum and dad is essential to learning social norms and how to behave in a range of situations.”

The Fathers for School Readiness website includes user-friendly tips, videos, resources for dads and messages for mums. The materials, which have been tested with dads (and mums) in workshops in early childhood centres, recognise the special qualities that fathers can bring to language, literacy and their play with their children.

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My problem with Greg’s agnumert is that it seems to be reducing parenting down to the physical labor of feeding, clothing, and cleaning. Presumably, as long as sufficient labor capability exists in the house, the problem is solved. By that mesure, children raised entirely by robots should be as well-adjusted as any others. I’m finding that a bit far-fetched.I would argue that single motherhood and single fatherhood are not compaable under the present circumstances, for a variety of reasons. Of course, the largest one is that in our current culture, there is no social stigma associated with not having a father or not knowing who one’s father is. Compare that to the case for adopted children, who do not know who either of their biological parents are. And there is no stigma associated with a household which has no father in it. I am a big believer that, in order to be well-adjusted in regards to how they relate to the oppsite sex, children need to have role models of both sexes. Now, there are different ways of accomplishing that goal, but that’s beside the point I want to make. I don’t have the stats in front of me night now, but a significant number of single mothers were themselves raised in single-mother households. Being that the welfare state has been in place for about 60 years now, this can extend back through three or four generations. A boy may find himself being raised in a family that is otherwise single-sex. This is very unlikely to happen in a father-only household. I would guess that the number of single-parent fathers who were themselves raised in a motherless household is minscule, probably not enough to study.Futher, the child of a single father still has plenty of exposure to female role models. They have female relatives. Some fathers hire caretakers, who are nearly all female. School teachers are mostly female. Compare this with the opposite situation. It’s quite possible that a child in a single-mother household will never meet an adult male realtive, due to the multi-generational chain of single mothering. In public schools, the child is unlikely to have a male teacher. Welfare and child-protective employees are mostly women too. It’s entirely possible that the child’s only “male role models” will be in the form of street gangs.So no, I don’t think that there is any such thing as gender-neutral “single parenting”. And I don’t think that studying father-only households will tell you anything about single-mother households. The two are simply not comparable.